One of President
Trump’s signature measures is his effort to purge the federal bureaucracy, what
he calls the “deep state,” of longstanding institutional commitments that are
inconsistent with his political program.
Trump’s crude buffoonery should not keep us from seeing that he has an
implicit constitutional theory: the President is the voice of the people, and
the institutions of government that were there when he arrived, to the extent
that they embody an ethic that impedes his goals, are the enemies of the
people. It is that inconsistent ethic
that makes “deep state” a derogatory epithet for Trump’s followers.
Recent events in
Syria suggest that Trump logically ought to start picking on a new target: the
U.S. military, which has an ethic radically at odds with his own.
The campaign against the deep state
is particularly clear with respect to climate change. Many government departments rely on science
to plan for the future. This leads them
to issue reports premised on (among other things) the massive evidence that
human action is bringing about ecological catastrophe. Trump, however, ran on a platform that denied
that climate change was happening.
Hence, the scientists had to go.
To take one notable example, Joel Clement was forced
out of his policy analysis job because he was working on mitigating the danger
of climate change to Native American communities. It wasn’t that Trump had anything against
those communities. But Clement’s work
was inconsistent with a core Trump Administration commitment.
The recent, abrupt
withdrawal from Syria, and American soldiers’ horrified reaction, suggests that
it is now time for another Trump purge.
The ethic of the
military has always been based on courage, respect for authority, trustworthiness,
integrity, and above all loyalty. Until
now, Trump had no reason to question all that.
But now it has become a problem for him.
The military’s ethic chafes at walking away from our friends and
compatriots, people with whom Americans have fought and died, and leaving them
to mass murder and oppression.
Events since
Trump’s decision have shown just how much the U.S. was accomplishing with a
skeleton force of a few hundred troops.
The Turkish invasion was enormously helped by the abruptness of America’s
withdrawal, which gave the Kurds no time to prepare. (It also disrupted
the joint American-Kurd operation that led to the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi – a potentially disastrous
miscalculation that warrants its own investigation.) After their abrupt exit, hundreds
are dead and there are about 170,000 refugees.
American troops have responded to
the precipitate betrayal of the Kurds with shame
and disgust. “It will go down in infamy,” said
one veteran Army officer who had served in Syria. “This will go down as a stain
on the American reputation for decades.” "I am ashamed for the first time in my
career," said one Special Forces soldier in Syria. Another
Army officer: “As Turkey attacked, I
couldn’t help but feel ashamed, number one, to have been part of it and, number
two, that we, America, I believe are violating our values. America in my mind is still the shining
beacon on the hill, but we are not living up to that right now.”
They clearly are not with the
program.
Just as it was
necessary to cull the federal bureaucracy and all its public statements to
eliminate any reference to climate change, it will now be necessary to cull the
military and all its public statements to eliminate any reference to honor.
If Trump takes his
opposition to the deep state seriously – it’s not clear that he does – then the
military will have to be reshaped in his image.
It will have to be a pretty thorough overhaul, probably the sort of
radical step that is best postponed until his second term. Keep an eye out for Fox
News segments
explaining why traditional notions of loyalty and honor are signs of the
un-American weakness of wimpy, Chablis-drinking, politically correct liberals.